Is there no one at MLB HQ with any common sense?
I’ve written here previously about MLB’s apparent insistence, in recent years, to play every single game as scheduled, completing nine innings, rarely postponing or suspending games even when common sense would indicate doing those sorts of things.
Two ridiculously long rain delays happened this past weekend, and neither one of them involved the Cubs, but I wanted to weigh in on what happened in St. Louis and Oakland.
The White Sox and Cardinals met Saturday afternoon at Busch Stadium. The game went into extra innings, and the Sox took a 6-5 lead in the top of then 10th. In the bottom of the inning, the Cardinals loaded the bases with the placed runner, a single and a fielder’s choice.
One out later, it started to rain. Hard.
Look at how hard it was raining! [VIDEO]
The teams played at least one full and one partial at-bat in that rain. That’s John Brebbia striking out Masyn Winn for the second out of the inning.
And then they kept playing! Brebbia got strike one on Nolan Gorman. Only then was the tarp pulled.
And they waited… and waited… and waited some more, as waves and waves of heavy thunderstorms pounded downtown St. Louis. They waited three hours and three minutes and resumed play.
Why on Earth would you do that? The teams had another game Sunday. Here’s what I would do in situations like that; Wait one hour, if it’s not clearing out soon, suspend the game and finish the next day.
But they didn’t. When the game resumed, pinch-hitter Ivan Herrera and reliever Tanner Banks picked up the at-bat. Before I continue the weather talk, let’s look at how badly plate umpire CB Bucknor called those pitches:
Pitch 1 was the one before the delay. Pitch 3 should have ended the game — that’s clearly a strike. Then there was a second foul ball, and Bucknor called pitch 5 strike three — that’s clearly a ball. So Bucknor got two calls wrong in this plate appearance, but in the end the result of the at-bat was the same — a strikeout. Yeesh, can’t we get the challenge system already?
Back to the weather. The time of the game was 3:12. The delay was 3:03. The game started at 1:17, so it ended at 7:32. That means by the time the players got dressed and back to the team hotel (Sox) or home (Cardinals), it’s probably 9 or 9:30 and they’ve got a 1:15 game the next day. Suspend this thing after an hour and resume at 12:05 and, well, at least the players get more rest.
Don’t talk to me about fans here. I watched the end of this game. They showed some of the fans in the stands during that last at-bat. There were fewer than 100 left. Everyone left! No one wanted to wait three hours!
For a situation like this, with heavy storms coming through and no end in sight: An hour wait, then suspend the game. Waiting like this is just ridiculous.
In Oakland on Saturday, a heavy rain event — rare, incidentally, in northern California in early May — passed through and they delayed the start of the Marlins/A’s game three hours, 23 minutes. A scheduled 1:05 start instead had the game begin at 4:30.
Don’t talk to me about fans here either. All of you know the A’s aren’t drawing anyway and there aren’t fans traveling hours and hours to get to this particular game. There likely weren’t a lot of Marlins fans traveling from south Florida to Oakland, either.
With a 2:43 game time, that had the game ending after 8 p.m. local time — again, with a day game Sunday. Why not just postpone this and play a doubleheader Sunday? Attendance was announced as 7,809 and again, I watched part of this game and there couldn’t have been more than 1,000 in the seats. Maybe a doubleheader, two for the price of one, brings a few more people out on Sunday? (Which was, incidentally, a bright, sunny day in Oakland.) There weren’t travel issues here — the Marlins headed to Los Angeles after the Oakland series, a one-hour flight for a night game Monday, and the A’s remained home.
To sum up, I simply do not understand the reasoning behind these delays of three hours or more. At a certain point I think MLB and the MLBPA need to be more respectful of players, gameday staff and fans. Having a game end seven hours after its scheduled start because of weather isn’t that. Baseball has done quite a bit to shorten games over the last few years, with the pitch timer shaving nearly 30 minutes off the average game time, and the placed runner in extras (something I’d rather not see, incidentally) ending most games by the 11th or 12th inning.
Why should weather delays be any different? An hour — two at most if it’s clear the weather’s going to move out — then suspend or postpone.